Henk Rossouw

Henk Rossouw's debut Xamissa (Fordham University Press, 2018) won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor's Prize. The African Poetry Book Fund included his chapbook The Water Archives in the 2018 box set New-Generation African Poets. Best American Experimental Writing 2018 (Wesleyan University Press) featured his work. His poems have been in POETRY, Lana Turner Journal, Poetry Northwest, World Literature Today, Boston Review, and The Paris Review. In 2024, he was a Willapa Bay Artist-in-Residence. He's an editor for Tupelo Quarterly and a consulting editor for the African Poetry Book Series at the University of Nebraska Press. Henk is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he co-directs the Creative Writing Program.

MFA, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2011
PhD, University of Houston, 2017

• Creative writing
• Modern and contemporary poetry
• Documentary poetics
• Ecopoetics

Books:

• Xamissa. Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize, Fordham University Press, 2018.
  www.fordhampress.com/9780823281107/xamissa

Poems:

• “Elevated Flare.” Gulf Coast, vol. 36, no. 1., 2023,
  gulfcoastmag.org/online/36.1-summer/fall-2023/elevated-flare/
• “Passerine.” POETRY, Sep. 2022, pp. 428-429,
  www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/158384/passerine
• “Sonnet for My Son.” Boston Review, vol. 39, no. 1, 2014, p. 74,
  bostonreview.net/poetry/henk-rossouw-sonnet-my-son
• “The Dream of The Road.” Paris Review, no. 205, 2013, pp. 237-238,
  www.theparisreview.org/poetry/6245/the-dream-of-the-road-henk-rossouw

Reviews of his work:

• Kempf, Christopher. “Review of Xamissa, by Henk Rossouw.” Colorado Review, 30 Apr. 2019, coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/xamissa/
• Darling, Kristina Marie. “‘Spare This Body, Set Fire to Another’: Speech and Silence in Work by Kaveh Akbar, Brenna Womer, and Henk Rossouw.” Kenyon Review, 7 Nov. 2018 kenyonreview.org/2018/11/spare-this-body-set-fire-to-another-speech-silence-in-work-by-kaveh-akbar-brenna-womer-henk-rossouw/

Outstanding Doctoral Student Mentor Award, College of Liberal Arts, 2022-2023